Previously in series:  Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately
Followup to:  Conjuring an Evolution To Serve You

GreyThumb.blog offered an interesting comparison of poor animal breeding practices and the fall of Enron, which I previously posted on in some detail.  The essential theme was that individual selection on chickens for the chicken in each generation who laid the most eggs, produced highly competitive chickens—the most dominant chickens that pecked their way to the top of the pecking order at the expense of other chickens.  The chickens subjected to this individual selection for egg-laying prowess needed their beaks clipped, or housing in individual cages, or they would peck each other to death.

Which is to say: individual selection is selecting on the wrong criterion, because what the farmer actually wants is high egg production from groups of chickens.

While group selection is nearly impossible in ordinary biology, it is easy to impose in the laboratory: and breeding the best groups, rather than the best individuals, increased average days of hen survival from 160 to 348, and egg mass per bird from 5.3 to 13.3 kg.

The analogy being to the way that Enron evaluated its employees every year, fired the bottom 10%, and gave the top individual performers huge raises and bonuses.  Jeff Skilling fancied himself as exploiting the wondrous power of evolution, it seems.

If you look over my accumulated essays, you will observe that the art contained therein is almost entirely individual in nature... for around the same reason that it all focuses on confronting impossibly tricky questions:  That's what I was doing when I thought up all this stuff, and for the most part I worked in solitude.  But this is not inherent in the Art, not reflective of what a true martial art of rationality would be like if many people had contributed to its development along many facets.

Case in point:  At the recent LW / OB meetup, we played Paranoid Debating, a game that tests group rationality.  As is only appropriate, this game was not the invention of any single person, but was collectively thought up in a series of suggestions by Nick Bostrom, Black Belt Bayesian, Tom McCabe, and steven0461.

Previously in series:  Your Price for Joining

Perhaps the single largest voluntary institution of our modern world—bound together not by police and taxation, not by salaries and managers, but by voluntary donations flowing from its members—is the Catholic Church.

It's too large to be held together by individual negotiations, like a group task in a hunter-gatherer band.  But in a larger world with more people to be infected and faster transmission, we can expect more virulent memes.  The Old Testament doesn't talk about Hell, but the New Testament does.  The Catholic Church is held together by affective death spirals—around the ideas, the institutions, and the leaders.  By promises of eternal happiness and eternal damnation—theologians don't really believe that stuff, but many ordinary Catholics do.  By simple conformity of people meeting in person at a Church and being subjected to peer pressure.  &c.

We who have the temerity to call ourselves "rationalists", think ourselves too good for such communal bindings.

And so anyone with a simple and obvious charitable project—responding with food and shelter to a tidal wave in Thailand, say—would be better off by far pleading with the Pope to mobilize the Catholics, rather than with Richard Dawkins to mobilize the atheists.

For so long as this is true, any increase in atheism at the expense of Catholicism will be something of a hollow victory, regardless of all other benefits.

Previously in series:  Raising the Sanity Waterline
Followup to:  Teaching the Unteachable

To teach people about a topic you've labeled "rationality", it helps for them to be interested in "rationality".  (There are less direct ways to teach people how to attain the map that reflects the territory, or optimize reality according to their values; but the explicit method is the course I tend to take.)

And when people explain why they're not interested in rationality, one of the most commonly proffered reasons tends to be like:  "Oh, I've known a couple of rational people and they didn't seem any happier."

Who are they thinking of?  Probably an Objectivist or some such.  Maybe someone they know who's an ordinary scientist.  Or an ordinary atheist.

That's really not a whole lot of rationality, as I have previously said.

Even if you limit yourself to people who can derive Bayes's Theorem—which is going to eliminate, what, 98% of the above personnel?—that's still not a whole lot of rationality.  I mean, it's a pretty basic theorem.

Since the beginning I've had a sense that there ought to be some discipline of cognition, some art of thinking, the studying of which would make its students visibly more competent, more formidable: the equivalent of Taking a Level in Awesome.

But when I look around me in the real world, I don't see that.  Sometimes I see a hint, an echo, of what I think should be possible, when I read the writings of folks like Robyn Dawes, Daniel Gilbert, Tooby & Cosmides.  A few very rare and very senior researchers in psychological sciences, who visibly care a lot about rationality—to the point, I suspect, of making their colleagues feel uncomfortable, because it's not cool to care that much.  I can see that they've found a rhythm, a unity that begins to pervade their arguments—

Yet even that... isn't really a whole lot of rationality either.

Previously in series:  Unteachable Excellence
Followup to:  Artificial Addition

The literary industry that I called "excellence pornography" isn't very good at what it does.  But it is failing at a very important job.  When you consider the net benefit to civilization of Warren Buffett's superstar skills, versus the less glamorous but more communicable trick of "reinvest wealth to create more wealth" - there's hardly any comparison.  You can see how much it would matter, if you could figure out how to communicate just one more skill that used to be a secret sauce.  Not the pornographic promise of consuming the entire soul of a superstar.  Just figuring out how to reliably teach one more thing, even if it wasn't everything...

What makes a success hard to duplicate?

Naked statistical chance is always incommunicable.  No matter what you say about your historical luck, you can't teach someone else to have it.  The arts of seizing opportunity, and exposing yourself to positive randomness, are commonly underestimated; I've seen people stopped in their tracks by "bad luck" that a Silicon Valley entrepreneur would drive over like a steamroller flattening speed bumps...  Even so, there is still an element of genuine chance left over.

Einstein's superstardom depended on his genetics that gave him the potential to learn his skills.  If a skill relies on having that much brainpower, you can't teach it to most people... Though if the potential is one-in-a-million, then six thousand Einsteins around the world would be an improvement.  (And if we're going to be really creative, who says genes are incommunicable?  It just takes more advanced technology than a blackboard, that's all.)

So when we factor out the genuinely unteachable - what's left?  Where you can you push the border?  What is it that might be possible to teach - albeit perhaps very difficult - and isn't being taught?

I was once told that half of Nobel laureates were the students of other Nobel laureates.  This source seems to assert 155 out of 503.  (Interestingly, the same source says that the number of Nobel laureates with Nobel "grandparents" (teachers of teachers) is just 60.)  Even after discounting for cherry-picking of students and political pull, this suggests to me that you can learn things by apprenticeship - close supervision, free-form discussion, ongoing error correction over a long period of time - that no Nobel laureate has yet succeeding in putting into any of their many books.

What is it that the students of Nobel laureates learn, but can't put into words?